URGENT - Advice/Confirmation on coccidial symptoms in laying hen

[TipsyDog]

The poop looks normal to me. Every once in a while a laying hen gets that "corral" color in the poop. While yours looks red, I'd keep checking her poop and see if more blood is found. My 3 week old chicks had cocci and it was runny poop with bright red blood. Their feathers were ruffled and they huddled and slept. They did not eat.

I hope your girl feels better, but I too do not believe this is cocci.

ETA: Here is a link for chicken poop pictures: http://www.chat.allotment.org.uk/index.php?topic=17568.0

 

[naturegrrl]

That doesn't look like cocci to me. Usually they will have diahrrea and there will either be lots of blood or no blood.

That was actually my understanding as well, and the reason I've been a little reluctant to decide for sure that it's coccidiosis. However...

Your bird's poo looks normal. They do shed the lining of the intestines every once in a while and it is an orangey red color. That is what I would think it is.

... I have become pretty familiar with the shed intestinal linings that show up in their poop (because I'm super paranoid, and examine their poo constantly) - it's a light, peachy-orange color, whereas these spots (which are *only* showing up on the urea cap, interestingly) are dark, almost garnet-red. If they'd gotten a hold of the beets in the garden, I'd suspect beet-dye, but I've checked that source and the beets are intact.

Also, the best treatment for cocci is amprolium/corid. Sulmet can be pretty harsh and you will have to pull your eggs, there is no withdrawal when using amprolium.

I will definitely be using corid if this illness does start to manifest more like a normal bout of coccidiosis - sulmet terrifies me. I've ordered a 16 oz bottle of corid, which will arrive in a day or two. At the moment, especially given your response to the poo pics (that they look pretty normal), I'm inclined to continue with the excessive pampering and worrying

, but hold off on hard treatment until either 1) she starts showing more extreme symptoms or 2) someone who has gone through bouts of coccidiosis in their adult chooks tells me that this definitely looks like coccidiosis.

Thanks for your advice - it really helps me just to have other people apply their own experiences and knowledge to my little problem. It would break my heart to lose any of my girls to anything other than comfortable old age (I started crying last night just thinking about it), and as a result I can be a little panicky when it comes to their health. Thanks again to everyone for responding!

And if anyone else has a comment or advice or experience to share, I would really love to hear it!​

 

[naturegrrl]

I hope your girl feels better, but I too do not believe this is cocci.

ETA: Here is a link for chicken poop pictures: http://www.chat.allotment.org.uk/index.php?topic=17568.0

Thank you so much for your well-wishes, and for the poo link - I actually found that a few months ago (when the girls were babies and no one had explained caecal poo to me and I was *freaking out*)... such an awesome, sanity-saving site! I did compare my poo pics to the one she has posted of coccidiosis-induced poop, put her photo is a bit fuzzy, so I couldn't get a good idea of scale, or tell how wet the poop was overall. I do hope that my worst fears are wrong, and that she just has a little bug of some (relatively harmless) sort. I'm glad to hear that you,too, are leaning away from this being a coccidial infection - makes me feel better every time someone else tells me that. I will just watch her closely as you said, and hope she gets better soon.​